Preview: Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, Part 4

Mile-High Audio

Coming Soon: Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2009—October, 2-4, 2009

Each Fall, music lovers and audiophiles of all stripes convene in Denver, CO for what has become an annual must-see/must-hear event: The Rocky Mountain Audio Fest.

To provide a preview for RMAF 2009, AVguide.com is posting The Absolute Sound’s report from the 2008 Fest,--a report that was originally published in The Absolute Sound issue 190 and was presented in four parts.

This post presents Part 4 of the report, by Robert Harley.

Enjoy, and please do join in us in Denver for RMAF 2009. --Chris Martens

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Mile-High Music

Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2008

Robert Harley on Digital and Electronics

 If you asked me the day before the opening of the 2008 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest what the overall theme of this show had been for the previous four years, I would have answered without hesitation “tubes and vinyl.” Although still in evidence, tubes and vinyl took a backseat this year to a powerful new trend—computer-based audio. If the exhibiting company wasn’t selling USB DACs, hard-disk storage products, and media servers, it was likely to be using a computer as a source component. When you see as traditional a company as the Audio Research Corporation using a Mac Book to drive its electronics and Wilson Sophia 2 loudspeakers, you know that computer audio has come of age.

The most interesting and exciting digital product at this RMAF was undoubtedly PS Audio’s Perfect Wave transport and UltraLink DAC. Unlike a conventional transport, the Perfect Wave is designed to read discs into hard-drive storage rather than play them on the fly. The transport has 64GB of RAM on-board, enough to store four minutes of music. The idea is that you connect a NAS (Network Accessible Storage) hard drive to the Perfect Wave and load your library to the drive for decoding through PS Audio’s UltraLink DAC. Of course, you can play discs conventionally, with the added benefit of the on-board data buffer. The LCD touchscreen display is extremely cool, although you can also access your music library wirelessly via an iPod Touch. PS Audio will offer a ripping service that transfers your music library to hard disk; you ship it your CDs, and PS will return the CDs along with a hard drive loaded with your library. The Perfect Wave will ship with CD-quality resolution but a firmware upgrade in the future will make the Perfect Wave compatible with high-resolution files. In addition to all the usual interfaces (BNC, AES, USB, optical), the Perfect Wave transport and UltraLink DAC can be connected via the I²S bus (on an HDMI connector) which carries a separate clock line and greatly reduces jitter. The price for each product is $2000, with availability expected in February. Watch for a full review.

Britain’s dCS launched the Scarlatti Upsampler, a digital-to-analog converter and upsampler designed for use with music servers as well as with a CD transport. The Scarlatti Upsampler uses the same Ring DAC technology found in dCS’s Scarlatti DAC and Puccini CD player. The full dCS Scarlatti stack (the $67,000 three-piece system) sounded wonderful at the front-end of a BAT system including the Rex preamp and VK-600SE monoblock power amplifiers (both of which I’ve had in my system) driving the Hansen Audio Emperor loudspeakers with Running Springs Audio’s new Dmitri power conditioner, all through Tara Omega and 0.8 interconnects and cables.